James Biber

James Biber’s Book List

There are those books that, like record covers of old, one can spend a lot of time poring over. For me, these tend to be visual feasts, though some literary works are equally involving. The self-taught lessons learned in these compulsive bouts are not easily forgotten (and neither are those lyrics and liner notes), and drugs have nothing to do with it.

A study of precision, clarity, and control. A house built by a philosopher acting as an architect (as opposed to the other way around) that competes with John Pawson for ascetic luxury. And it was for his sister!

I attended college intending to be a biologist. That turned out to be a bad idea, but it wasn’t until I borrowed this massive volume from my father that I had the courage to try architecture. Winters are bleak in Ithaca and so were freshman dorms. I spent an entire semester of short, dark days studying every single page of this book, the first of the now ubiquitous gargantuan design books. It was very convincing.

The conception, design, and construction of an enormous, completely demountable, glass, wood, and cast-iron building in nine months would be a miracle today; in 1851 it was a feat of divine intervention. This book, published in facsimile by the V&A from the original and bought during my first trip to Europe, contains the entire set of gorgeous hand-drawn, ink-on-vellum working drawings. From it I learned more about how buildings are put together (and in this case, taken apart and put back together again) than from any other single book. The Crystal Palace was 1,851 feet long (get it?), a trope Daniel Libeskind’s Freedom Tower (1,776 feet high, get it?) seems to have kept alive. Maybe he has a copy of it too…

Just like the 24-hour movie collage, there are still images from movies featuring clocks counting nearly every minute of an entire day. Just as insane as the film and just as captivating. If you have seen the installation, you know that while it sounds like a neat idea taken to an extreme, it is actually a new form of narrative. People would stay for hours because it was so interesting, not because the doors were locked.

You could pick practically any of the Bechers’ volumes, but this and Typologies (also on my Book List) cover the field for me. Photographed under the gray, soft light of clouded skies, these collected images of industrial artifacts approach the subject from the typological organization (essentially a genus and species of industry) and from the sweeping landscape of modern ruin. Their photographs are always beautiful, but the books allow a comparative study that most gallery shows can’t.

Hindsight has a way of creating an amnesia about what you once didn't know. The view of the worst genocidal maniac and his psychopathic Reich, all documented by verbatim dialogue (mostly from private contemporary written accounts), is an exercise in the famous “boiling frog” theorem. It was, at nearly every point, inconceivable that Hitler, Göring, Himmler, Goebbels, Hess (and dozens of other less well-known and more complex figures) along with the entire nation could be led to the end we now know. This account is a remarkable and excruciating—and instructive.

MoMA has produced a huge number of significant books (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966, was not unique) but this one appeared at precisely the right time for me. The corresponding exhibition put Italy at the very forefront of design at a time of relative architectural poverty in the United States. The vellum cover, filled with colorful cutouts of iconic pieces, was designed by Ambasz and remains a brittle, yellowed jacket on my copy.

That it only takes eight volumes to contain the entire architectural oeuvre of this gargantuan figure is the real surprise. Owning the complete set seemed entirely out of reach when I first was introduced to the set in architecture school. I bought a single volume (52–57) for $17 in college, and eventually owned the entire set. It is so packed with intelligence (a friend called it “the idea book”) that I will never fully exhaust it as a reference.

I am new to this series, published in the 1960s and ‘70s, which, along with Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm, includes Structure in ArtandScience and Arts of the Environment. They are a serious and detailed collection of design thought from people like John Cage, Rudolf Arnheim, Max Bill, Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Nervi, Fumiko Maki, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Robert Smithson. I was attracted by the cover art and titles, and the books turn out to be equally rich in content.

Photographs and other “evidence” from Frances Glessner Lee’s forensic dollhouses, used to teach crime detection in the 1940s. Lee, who grew up in H.H. Richardson’s famed Glessner House in Chicago, built these highly accurate and evidence-laden crime scenes at 1” = 1’-0 and used each as a lesson. They are beautiful and strange, photographed exquisitely and copiously explained. They are also insane.

Another link between my biology studies and architecture is this mathematical study of form in nature. All the famous examples, plus many, many more and a deep mathematical analysis of every one of them.

The first complete study of the Maison de Verre by Pierre Chareau, written by Kenneth Frampton. Plus Alan Colquhoun on typology, Allan Greenberg on Lutyens, Walter Benjamin on Paris, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Emilio Ambasz, all wrapped in a black debossed Pirelli Tile pattern. Need I say more?

A study, with beautiful hand-drawn plans, sections, and elevations, of Venice’s multiple housing. Timely postwar study of what is actually remarkably modern architecture in the less-touristed portions of Venice.

From the author of Information Architecture, who says about his newest book: “This is a book for people to dip into, as they would walk in and out of the room of a dinner party and embrace their interests. . . Before the rules on how to organize information, before you learn grammar, before you work hard at expanding your vocabulary and go through the exercises of parallel meanings of things as using a Thesaurus and as one writes papers in class, before any learning one must understand.”

Photographs taken by designer Jasper Morrison of objects in the collection of the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon, Portugal. “The objects photographed and described may be appreciated both for their beauty and for the example they set of design at its purest. The Hard Life is a continuation of Morrison’s celebration of the ordinary and offers a new perspective on his design philosophy.”

New book covering the career of of master designer Paula Scher, called “the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet.” (Ellen Lupton), This definitive, chronological visual record spans Paula’s early days in the music industry as an art director with CBS and Atlantic records; the launch of her first studio, Koppel & Scher; and her 25-year engagement with Pentagram.

Reveals how type can become both content and illustration, as letters take the form of people, animals, cars, or planes. With numerous illustrations by F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Munari, and Francis Picabia, among others, as well as by contemporary designers such as Richard Eckersley, John Hendrix, Maira Kalman, and Corita Kent.

The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design: New from Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio

The Modernsby Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio
Publisher: Abrams
Published September 19, 2017

Featuring more than 60 designers whose magazine, book, and record covers; advertisements and package designs; posters; and other projects created the visual aesthetics of postwar modernity in America. Some were émigrés from Europe; others were homegrown; all were intoxicated by elemental typography, primary colors, photography, and geometric or biomorphic forms. Some are well-known, others are honored in this volume for the first time, and together they comprised a movement that changed our design world.